Chronic Self-Sabotage as Success-Avoidance Wrong Attractor: The Unconscious Ceiling, Identity-Threat Architecture, and the Return to Deserved Achievement

Chronic self-sabotage — the systematic pattern of behavior that prevents or undermines one's own progress toward goals — is here formally reconceptualized as a wrong attractor W_SS in the landscape of deserved achievement. The healthy ground state S^0 is defined as deserved achievement: the capacity to pursue, reach, and inhabit success without unconscious interference. W_SS arises because success threatens the existing identity structure; the person operates near an unconscious ceiling (Hendricks's upper limit problem) where proximity to success triggers protective displacement behavior.

The wrong attractor is sustained through low self-worth as basin floor, impostor syndrome amplification, and a continuum of behaviors from fully unconscious sabotage to ego-syntonic self-handicapping. Nine formal propositions characterize the identity-threat mechanism, basin deepening through self-worth deficits, the behavioral signature spectrum (procrastination, conflict-creation, illness at threshold moments), the unconscious-to-conscious continuum, the distinction from genuine failure and adaptive caution, and return paths through identity expansion, schema therapy, and success-deserving belief revision.